Knowledge that Transforms

As the financial system expands to new clients and services, countries are promoting financial education, with unknown long-run returns. In 2011, we studied the short-run impact of a comprehensive financial education program through a randomized controlled trial with 892 high schools in Brazil. This paper uses administrative data for 16,000 students over the next nine years to measure the program's long-term impact. We find that treatment students are less likely to borrow from expensive sources or to make delayed loan repayments than control students. The program also caused students to shift from formal jobs to microenterprise ownership.

Using inflation and growth forecasts for a panel of emerging and advanced economies, we provide evidence that foreign forecasters publish and update their forecasts less frequently than local forecasters and make larger errors. We provide tests that identify differences in information frictions across groups and show that the lower accuracy of foreigners is not due to more irrational expectations, but to less precise information. This informational advantage is linked both to barriers to information and to incentives and is typically stronger when uncertainty is lower. These results provide a basis for disciplining international finance and trade models with heterogeneous information.

Does mining activity lead to deforestation? How does investor origin affect the environmental impacts of mining operations? We investigate these questions by estimating the causal impact of mineral price changes on deforestation near mining sites. Combining global mine propertylevel data with high-resolution satellite imagery on forest cover, we find a positive elasticity of deforestation to mineral price shocks. This elasticity is significantly lower when mine owners are from countries with higher income or better institutions, but it is not affected by host country characteristics. Evidence suggests that mine owners from higher-income countries induce different types of local economic activity.

Americans with more education vote more, but we know little about whether this effect on civic participation arises from educational quality or quantity. Using admissions lotteries at Boston charter schools, we find that charter attendance boosts voter participation, substantially increasing voting in the first presidential election after a student turns 18 by six percentage points from a baseline of 35 percent. This effect operates through increased turnout, as there is no increase in registration. Rich data enable us to explore multiple potential channels of this voting impact. Our evidence suggests that charters increase voting by increasing noncognitive skills.

We study how inertia interacts with market power and adverse selection in health insurance. We incorporate inertia into a model of plan selection and price competition, and estimate it using data from the California ACA exchange. We estimate inertia costs equaling 26% of average premiums. Our simulations indicate that inertia exacerbates market power, but has minimal interaction with selection. Eliminating inertia reduces average premiums by 6.6%. Maintaining premium-linked subsidies or reducing consumer churn increases the impact of inertia by enhancing market power. Provider network attachment is an important impediment to plan switching, but substantial inertia remains after accounting for networks.

We examine how Rules of Origin (RoO) and cumulation provisions in Free Trade Agreements shape imports and supply chains. Using a new RoO database and two policy changes, the Pan-European Cumulation System and the 2004 EU enlargement, we show that relaxing RoO increases intermediate imports from countries where cumulation restrictions were lifted. A 1% higher value requirement before liberalization raised such imports by 0.4–0.7%. Effects are stronger when preferential margins are higher, underscoring the joint role of RoO, cumulation provisions, and tariffs in shaping sourcing decisions.

Those involved with the criminal justice system have disproportionately high rates of mental illness and substance-use disorders, prompting speculation that health insurance, by improving treatment of these conditions, could reduce crime. Using the 2008 Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, which randomly made some low-income adults eligible to apply for Medicaid, we find no statistically significant impact of Medicaid coverage on criminal charges or convictions. These null effects persist for high-risk subgroups, such as those with prior criminal cases and convictions or mental health conditions. In the full sample, our confidence intervals can rule out most quasi-experimental estimates of Medicaid’s crime-reducing impact.

Despite extensive evidence on the importance of non-cognitive skills for labor market outcomes, to what extent training can affect specific skills in adulthood remains an open question. We conducted a randomized controlled trial with low-skilled employed workers in Senegal where workers were randomly assigned to receive a training intervention designed to affect conscientiousness-related skills. We found that treated workers were significantly more likely to stay in their job, had higher earnings and better performance grades post intervention. Our findings suggest that non-cognitive skills can be affected later in the life cycle and targeted training can have substantial labor market returns.

This paper exploits the historical system of salt taxation in France to study the impact of extractive taxes on long-term economic development. Salt tax rates exhibited significant spatial variation, leading to discontinuous jumps in salt prices. Adopting a spatial regressiondiscontinuity design, we estimate the causal effect of the tax using original historical data. We extract geo-localized individual-level information on almost 70 million individuals living near tax borders between 1400 and 1900. These exogenous rate differentials had large effects, as areas burdened by lower rates exhibit higher economic development. These effects emerged after the tax’s introduction and persisted post-abrogation to the present day.

Search frictions and misallocation are common in decentralized transportation markets. Using novel trip-level data of taxis in Singapore, this paper examines the impactof real-time demand information at airport terminals on search frictions. The in-formation reduces taxi supply misallocation, increasing deadheading speed by 16.3%and decreasing deadheading time by 10.77%, benefiting both passengers and drivers.It raises daily earnings by $3.70 USD and adds 6.2 minutes of operational time perairport-trip taxi. Spatial spillovers are primarily observed among drivers in adjacentdistricts. Taxis from the Budget Terminal and drivers with fewer prior airport pickups benefit more from this information.